Robert Hampton

The Apple v Microsoft rivalry, always simmering away in the background, exploded last week. Apple CEO Tim Cook made a thinly-veiled attack on Microsoft while unveiling Apple’s new products last Tuesday:

Our competition is different. They’re confused. They chased after netbooks. Now they’re trying to make PCs into tablets and tablets into PCs.

You don’t need to have Alan Turing’s code-breaking skills to work out that this was a reference to Windows 8. Just like every other Star Trek film is a dud, so Windows XP (OK, at least by the time Service Pack 3 came around) was followed by Vista (aargh!), then 7 (a decent OS which I genuinely like) and now 8 (oh dear).

The newest version of Microsoft’s OS was slated from all sides, firstly for chucking out the familiar Start Menu (a key part of the user interface since 1995) in favour of a new design, and secondly for seemingly being designed for use with touch screens, with keyboard and mouse navigation almost an afterthought.

Until recently, my only exposure to Windows 8 has been through helping to set up a couple of laptops for people in work. It was an intensely frustrating experience. The Desktop was still there, along with all the traditional Windows features (Control Panel, Explorer, Task Manager), but having to go through the Start screen to access them seemed so much more cumbersome than before. The real low point came when I had to Google how to shut down the PC. Turns out you have to hover the cursor at the bottom right of the screen, click Settings in the Charms bar, then Power, then Shut down.

The “Shut down” option being hidden under “Settings” gives some idea of just how illogical Windows 8 felt. I consider myself an expert computer user, but Windows 8 will make you feel like Nan using a computer for the first time. It was certainly enough to finally push me into switching to a Mac – I reasoned that, if I was going to have to relearn a whole new OS, it might as well be one that makes sense.

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It’s hard to imagine now, but when this blog was founded, I had to write the entries by creating a series of punched cards, which were then sent by first class post to a laboratory in Cambridge, where a man in a white coat would feed them one-by-one into a mainframe computer to create each blog post.

OK, that’s obviously not true. But technology has moved on in leaps and bounds in the last decade, often in new and unpredictable ways. In 2003 there were no YouTube videos to embed, no tweets to RT, and if you poked someone in public, you could expect a slap in the face in return. Google was a search engine company rather than an… everything company.

As for me, in 2003 I was still using RISC OS, the operating system designed by Acorn Computers for their ARM-based systems. Acorn had shut up shop in 1998, but the OS was still being developed by an independent company and I had fun playing with the latest versions as they were released. I was also still using it to do web design work (still haven’t found an app as good as Draw for quick pictures and diagrams). So when my machine started developing hardware faults, I was alarmed.

When computers develop hardware problems, my usual attitude is something approaching blind panic. I never did a backup (I meant to, but never get round to it), and I never paid attention when the hard drive started playing up last year (I meant to, but never got round to it). Procrastination 1, Rob 0.

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This time last year (more or less), I was eagerly anticipating the arrival of my new PC with Windows Vista preloaded. This excitement soon evaporated when it became clear that Vista is actually a bit poo.

This New York Times article reveals some interesting internal wrangles at Microsoft over the development and marketing of Vista. To be honest, it makes for quite depressing reading.

I’m starting to think I should have gone with my first instinct, waited a few months longer and spent a bit of extra cash to get a Mac with OS X Leopard and the ability to dual boot MacOS and XP.

The real problem, of course, is that the best solution failed. 🙁